Taking things to the next level. From my sofa

About

Just a mom, interested in learning and experimenting. I have an open-minded mother, a lot of aunts and willing relatives to be my guinea pigs in all things health and nutrition related. I have some amazingly hip and fashionable sisters who get me back on the path when needed. I sometimes get things wrong, but I’ll come clean about it.

I also own some businesses in the States, but they don’t seem to be related to any of these interests yet. Maybe one day they will converge and then I will be living the dream, people.

I am writing this blog because my family and friends keep asking me so many questions, and now I’m hoping I can just send them here. Then when we have a meal together we can talk about other stuff, like existentialism and gossip.

Can’t blog without a cat, obviously! She’s a Balinese Hiking Cat and she goes everywhere with us.

18 MONTH UPDATE – THIS GETS SORT OF DARK

EEEEEEK.

I just want to comment on myself, after writing this little blog for 18 months, that I totally realize how lame it is to write anonymously. My high school newspaper editor told me as much when I tried to submit a scathing editorial without attaching my name to it. She shamed me into being brave, and it turned out that I earned a great name for myself in high school as a crusader – even if my crusades were pretty unsubstantial (I wanted the right to drink soda, of all things, in my school uniform at my very Victorian school LOL).

I used to be a professional writer, and earned a living as well as some self-esteem from that job. But I have always found that the primary joy of creation tends to get eroded when you start doing it for money or ego. Or at least that’s one kind of rationalization.

My bigger rationalization is super controversial, most likely, and I haven’t wanted to share it because it basically makes me look like a selfish monster. However since more than 10,000 people from nearly every country in the world have visited this random, unadvertised, unlinked, unfacebooked, unsocial-media-ed blog for some reason or another, I feel like I should offer a little more explanation.

There are millions of problems in the world, and plenty of causes – my belief is that they all boil down to one thing: overpopulation. I think our species has lost touch with the taboos that limited our tribe size and expansion. Our clever minds have created technologies, ostensibly to solve “problems”, which have allowed us to live with increasingly impossible densities in increasing hostile and inhabitable environments. Some countries, like China, have had some success in curbing populations by enacting laws limiting the amount of children allowed in families to one. And although China actually has negative population growth this year, it is still the most populated country in the world with 1.36 billion citizens.

Chances are something drastic may happen, be it a global plague of superbugs created by antibiotic resistance, chronic mounting natural disasters from climate change, or just increasingly violent wars due to scarcity of water and resources. However those are all such grim and unpleasant ends to our humanity, and I hope it doesn’t come to that.

I have a kinder, gentler solution that doesn’t rely on destroying personal liberties or fantasizing about Armageddon. I contend that relatively minor nutritional deficiencies, played out over a couple of generations, will make many of our species infertile. That’s my simple solution: gradual infertility. I think we are already starting to see it happen.

I think that what contributes most quickly to nutritional degradation is cheap commodity carbohydrates, which replace whole foods and especially fat soluble vitamins in the diet.

And now I have to come clean about something else. I am no longer a professional writer. Instead, I inherited a business that profits from selling cheap commodity carbohydrates. In addition, I married into a family that sells commodity carbohydrates on a global scale. The house I live in is paid for with sugar. The hand that feeds me isn’t feeding me sugar, but it is a hand made of sugar.

I am not writing this blog on the side to make up for the nutritional damage I am doing to my customers, or am likewise complicit in. I am only writing this blog for the sake of my family and friends, to help educate them so that we are not plagued by nutritional degradation and infertility three generations from now. My friends and family know who I am, obviously, and my credibility and research is theirs to determine.

The reason this blog is not restricted and private is because I love the internet community of biohackers and readers and writers, and I look forward to their comments, criticisms and enlightenment. We are a group that experiments on ourselves and learns from each other. This kind of dialog thrives on open access.

However I have received many comments (unpublished) about why I don’t accept donations, or how do I make money from this, or do I want to hire other writers or be hired on other blogs (or worse, do I want to generate free content by running the text of another blog through a program that slightly changes the words, i.e. plagiarism). I am not doing this for money or ego. I am just doing this to satisfy my own curiosity about what will actually make me, my family and my community of friends thrive and reproduce for generations to come.

If you have just stumbled on this blog, even though it is probably buried deep in crappy search ranks, then you are probably someone with similar values to me – someone curious, someone who keeps asking questions even when the authorities tell you there is nothing left to know, and someone with a problem to solve who is taking personal responsibility for the solution. So I don’t mind sharing this information with you.

You are the kind of person that the world needs, after all. Let everyone else eat cake.

You are blowing my mind a bit today… I’ve been trying to beak my fat sigma lately anyway and this is helping…. Quick question … When you talk about carbohydrates and give amounts in grams…. Do you mean grains or all carbs including fruit and veggies?

Hi. Unfortunately (!) I’m talking about all carbohydrates including fruits, vegetables, grains, pulses, legumes, “natural” sugars, nuts, seeds, refined carbohydrates etc. Though some have more benefits than others, and some will elicit a slower release of insulin than others (which is better), the net amount of insulin needed to neutralize the ingested glucose is the same. And it will be different for everybody. My daughter (and husband) can eat a lot of fruit and carbohydrates with no outward obvious effects. But after hitting a certain age, I haven’t been as lucky and notice a big difference when I over-consume carbohydrates.

I don’t notice anything when I eat fruit. It usually makes me feel great, in fact! However if I am attempting to be in ketosis, fruit is impossible because of the very high carbohydrate load. (Ketosis usually requires less than 50g of carbohydrate a day, a single banana has about 27g). However in general, when I eat carbohydrates I usually feel just fine but then have an increase in hunger and cravings. It’s that increase in hunger and cravings that leads me down a dark path and before I know it all the Toblerones are gone.

I’ve just read the last part of your blog, where you explain you theory of how humanity will dwindle due to nutritional degradation. Wow! All of what you said resonated do strongly with me. I am do frightened for the western world. It’s going down hill fast. Your final words moved me to tears because finally someone appreciates my little battles to keep my family healthy. Someone understands tufts we have to fight to battle what the TV tells us is good for us . We are so far from how we should be in the west. Dr Weston Price was mourning the degeneration of our species and he could see it happening right before his eyes. We need to reconnect with our food and take control of our health once more.
So thank you for expressing what I feel.

Thank you for reading, and for your thoughtful comments, Terri. We are really living through a great experiment right now.

Classically starved mothers (by famine or pestilence) produced offspring who were smaller, slower to develop and less fertile – but the children were compensated with higher stress resistance which could make them more resilient to disease.

However now mothers that are merely nutritionally starved (yet still fattened up with empty calories and anti-nutrients) will have fatter, quickly developing babies but conversely much lower stress resistance; it is still unknown what their fertility potential will be, but my guess is that the wonky hormones might initially increase fertility but with less successful outcomes (think of babies and toddlers diagnosed with type-2 diabetes etc). The short-term increased fertility in this case would be a survival mechanism of the organism, but without a long-term plan for success unless humans can adapt quickly enough (just a couple generations) to industrial food.

I’ve consumed your site top to bottom, and love it! Thank you laying out so eloguently the natural, kind, and sustainable path forward if we are to survive as a species. Closer to home, our family continues to fine tune our path, and I deeply appreciate your site for its helpful posts. We raise grass fed beef here in Ontario, and unfortunately we are surrounded by round-up ready corn and soy fields. Most of our friends and family don’t want to know about organics etc as they are too attached to their carbs…..sadly.
All that to say, thank you, and I hope you will continue with your excellent posts!

Hi Annemarie – this was the nicest comment I’ve ever received! Thank you. Do you happen to deliver your beef to Toronto? Or is it available in Creemore or Collingwood? I took a few years off of posting as I’ve been having more children – who seem to steal my brain cells while I’m pregnant and nursing. Hoping I learn to communicate with adults again when they are a bit older!

Once all my issues had disappeared – sleeplessness mostly – I got lazy about LDN and then forgot about it altogether. I’m pregnant now and my concern about LDN while pregnant is that it might set up hormone signals incorrectly for the baby, so I definitely quit it while pregnant. This is not research, just a “feeling” and a precaution. But I do think that after pregnancy and breastfeeding, I will go back on – mostly as a preventative for sickness and larger illnesses like cancer. The fact that all the researchers take it themselves as a preventative for cancer is good enough for me. It’s pretty cheap compared to chemo drugs, and also I never seem to get sick (colds and flu) while on it.